It's warming up enough each day that ice is falling off the roof, but you wouldn't necessarily know it otherwise. Brrr.

This week I've been mostly working on 513 stuff. Bug fixes once again took top billing, and while there are some outstanding items on the docket I've at least managed to clear up some really annoying ones, like how certain blend_mode values didn't work right when the layering filter was used in certain ways. I was going nuts on that one till I finally figured out what was going on, and managed to work the fix in such a way that this specific sort of bug won't rear up again (as it has in the past)—at least not for blend_mode.

Speaking of blend_mode, I hadn't forgotten that I wanted to add a new blend mode that also did some alpha masking using the destination as a mask, so I finally got BLEND_INSET_OVERLAY in place. The funny thing is, this was already being used internally for inset shadows in the drop shadow filter; I didn't realize it until I added the new blend code and noticed it was identical to this special internal mode. That's why I chose the name the way I did, but I also think it's highly descriptive and easy to understand just from the name, which is what you want in a good name.

I mentioned not too long ago that I was working on some maptext upgrades, and those are in place now. Now you can use left and right margins, mix different horizontal alignments in different paragraphs which you couldn't before, use justified alignment, and use text-indent. I also want to look into upgrading the grid, info, and label controls to be able to use the maptext engine for their HTML rendering, since right now all of them are limited to a single style (per cell, for grid/info controls) instead of allowing a mix.

Also, after looking into why some users reported the "in" operator was much slower than list.Find() when used for the same purpose, I was able to find out why. The result is that in 513.1508, testing if something is in a list with the "in" operator should be much faster. I expect it to outperform list.Find() in many more cases now.

Someone asked me yesterday what the biggest feature in 514 will be, and indeed I'm starting to think ahead to 514, but I don't have a lot on that drawing board yet besides an idea of adding particles. I also want to spend some time getting CEF going, and that's been a very difficult bear to wrestle with; I tried staring at it somewhat this week, and it's just awful.

Thank you to everyone who's helped support BYOND so far this month, via Membership, donation, or on Patreon or SubscribeStar. If you haven't yet, please ransack that couch for change; it doesn't take much individually to help BYOND development keep going, but it makes all the difference.

We have just over one week left to prepare for Superbowl Sunday! Since my teams are out of the running I'm basically rooting for the one that didn't take one of them out, which would be the Chiefs. But of course as is so often the case, I'm really rooting for the food and for good commercials.